2007 WINTER / SPRING / SUMMER / FALL
WAKE WAKE WAKE
by Valerie Nieman
Press53 (2006) 96 pages, $14.00
PoetryValerie Nieman’s Wake Wake Wake is her first, full-length collection of poetry, though she has published two chapbooks, How We Live and Slipping Out of Old Eve, two novels, Survivors and Neena Gathering, and one short story collection, Fidelities. Nieman’s versatility is admirable and evident in these poems which range from formal (the lovely “A Gift of Collected Sonnets”) to the form poem (“Pissing in the Woods,” which looks something like a stream).
Nieman is from West Virginia (as am I) and her poetry reflects the harsh beauty found in that still-wild state. The collection is divided into three sections, What Has Passed, A Watch By Night, and Stir Up, as Passions, or Evoke, as an Echo. In the first section, Nieman explores her memories of mother, land, neighbors, and the natural world. Her poems are gritty and as down to earth as digging toes into slick creek slime. Listen: Ridge farm, early spring:/ I nose along the wet/ belly of the land,/ the hummocked fields,/ dead grass furrowed/ by voles and frost.// Here: A waft of skunk,/ maybe the urine/ of a fox,/ or flesh leaking/ from the nibbled arc/ of a fungus.
No nostalgic view of nature is found here. Instead, Nieman’s love of the world is discovered in her deep attention to its details, which she embraces with the ferocity of a new mother, even when those details include the messy business of birth and death and anything in between.
Besides great descriptions of the mountain world, Nieman’s poems can be humorous and quite lively. Take the first line in “Farm Wife,” for example. You can tell a country woman/by her feet. I love that! The rest of the poem follows the woman’s feet through the seasons of farming life, ending with By harvest the blood of her weariness/drips from her broken feet/and sows itself amidst the ripened corn.
Nieman doesn’t sugar-coat anything in these poems, and her unvarnished truth-telling adds strength and character to these words, a quality I welcome.
In the second section, the poems become character studies: a stranger describing the way the land used to look, a man talking about his life with his woman, someone coveting a dead neighbor’s ladder. My favorite, though, isn’t about people; instead, it’s about trees, “Night Alone”: The trees, remembering/ that they are sky/go back to it,/sky emptying/snow among the branches,/the branches lifting/up their dark selves,/the burned-work/of sun and air,/the living cinder,/until sky and tree/are the same,/are night,/and my shuttle/soul lies down.
The final section is a collage of images and narratives about people who live in the Appalachian Mountains and die there. This section is a fine way to end the collection—it’s almost a slideshow of West Virginia life.
Nieman’s collection is a worthy one and the cover is sumptuous, too.Anne Barnhill
THE LAST OF HER KIND
by Sigrid Nunez
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux (2006) 375 pages, $25
ISBN-13: 978-0-374-18381-3, FictionSigrid Nunez’s fifth novel is the story of two women colliding in the culture wars of the sixties and seventies.
George—for Georgette—is a Barnard freshman in 1968, the year of the Tet offensive that unraveled LBJ’s Vietnam War, the year that saw Martin Luther King assassinated in April, followed by Robert Kennedy in June. Throw in pot, hippies, race riots and the feminist movement and you have the cauldron George steps into.Then she meets her roommate. Dooley Drayton, known as Ann, a rich kid from Connecticut, asked to be paired with a person of color, but got George, white-trash breakout, instead. The Dooleys had been Southern slave owners. Ann drops the given name, longing to prostrate herself before the underprivileged, assuming George comes pre-packaged with outrage. But George isn’t offended by her poverty and Ann never figures out there are no necessary heroics to being poor or black or female.
She berates her oblivious parents in a deliciously awkward scene at a restaurant she drags George to, a posh joint George would never dream of entering, where she meets the Draytons. George is wide-eyed and hungry. After tossing a handful of verbal grenades at Mom and Dad, Ann refuses to eat, which precludes George from eating. Livid, Ann drags George outside and leaves her confused on the sidewalk. George’s mother, abandoned by her father with three kids to feed on a school cafeteria worker’s pay, is hellish; Mrs. Drayton benign royalty by comparison. The contrast eludes Ann, unacquainted as she is with complex emotional textures.
In a memoir she never intends anyone to read, Georgette explains Ann: “She believed that some of the chains in which men everywhere found themselves were those emotional ones that prevented them from giving voice to their suffering and letting others know what they needed. This was a favorite theme, a cornerstone of Ann’s philosophy of life, and I could never hear it without thinking, ‘Don’t let the pack know you’re wounded,’ which was a kind of motto where I came from.” Their clashes—bystander and activist—are a microcosm of the clashes taking place in America. Ann turns hardcore, an amalgam of a Kathy Boudin, Patricia Hearst and ‘Squeekie’ Fromme. Her dream of saving the world twists inevitably out of shape because she lacks the compassion of a Rosa Parks or Gandhi or King.
George admires Ann but grows increasingly bewildered and uncomfortable and drops out of school. When she takes a job with a fashion magazine, Ann doesn’t bother to hide her disdain. Surrounded by the swirl of events, George remains remarkably untouched. Childhood blunted her, and when she is raped and given a dose of heroin, encouraged to pass out rather than think, she goes along. The rapist was black after all, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, partly her own fault; what the whites have done to blacks and so on. The sexual revolution cancelled the usual strictures; Nunez brings this hidden side of liberation strikingly to light. Years later, explaining the rape to her daughter’s friends, George is told she’s in denial, rape is rape. She says it was a different time, but they don’t buy it.
Impossible, too, the violence that lands Ann in prison. She was among the last of a radical kind—until the current breed of terrorist—to sanction any means necessary. It took a recession, Ronald Reagan and the reactionary rise of the right to fizzle the revolution that would not be televised. Nunez gives us the counterculture that became anathema to Evangelical Christians. If the portrait is dark, it is also of a time that addressed racial and sexual inequality, and took sex out of the closet. Some of the then-forming leaders of today wished the era never happened. Freedom too free for them: women burning bras and abortion legalized, pothead flower power alongside politics of socialism, corporation a dirty word. (The good old days.)
The culture revolution was doomed. Scenes like the LSD trip George takes with her unbalanced, hippie sister Solange zoom in, “Everyone always said the same things. Oh, the colors, the colors, and it was like you were seeing everything for the first time, and if you didn’t fight it, you would lose your ego and find bliss.” (Can’t have that.)
George’s passivity brings her to motherhood and the bland middle class. Her memoir captures a past she barely lived. Ann burns out never realizing the harm she’s done in the name of social justice. Sigrid Nunez has realized a critical moment, the counterculture brought back in living color; the last of its kind.Janyce Stefan-Cole
WHY MONKEYS LIVE IN TREES and Other Stories from Benin
by Raouf Mama with drawings by Andy Jones
Curbstone Press (2006) 84 pages, $12.95
FictionTERRESTRIAL MUSIC
poems by John Bradley
Curbstone Press (2006) 74 pages, $13.95
Poetry
These two new titles from Curbstone originate in contrasting worlds. Dr. Raouf Mama is a storyteller and performer of material from Benin. John Bradley teaches at Northern Illinois University and has a list of previous publications including (as editor) Atomic Ghosts: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age and Learning to Glow: A Nuclear Reader. Dr. Mama’s book is written in simple language and presents a sequence of moralistic tales that preserve folklore while Bradley writes of the impact the industrialization of warfare has wrought.The Benin stories are built around elemental images, including animals and princes, a jar and a blind man’s lamp. Reading them in a time when stories are often transmitted via the television screen rather than around a campfire inspires a nostalgia for language with the power to hold attention with no special effects in the manner of a CSI episode. It is easy to dismiss such writing as naïve in a complex era, but the basis of Why Monkeys Live in Trees is as real as anything we discover in high-tech transmission. Such a book has an obvious appeal for children as well as adults seeking a vision of life that still places faith in our ability to recognize goodness when we find it. Not that the stories read like a Benin version of What a Wonderful World; they do crackle with enough tension for us to know that telling good from evil is not only the mission of contemporary politicians looking to exploit us. The strength of this genre is that it can go to the heart of issues that concern us all in the way that, for example, Louis Magbo describes environmental loss. After the gruesome death of the protagonist and his wife, who had replaced a forest with their farm, the land returns to its primal state. . . Once again, it was alive with birdsong, the chirping of crickets, and the cries of myriads of creatures. Once again the grass was green and matted, as it had been for ages. And once again the trees, tall and imposing, stood close together, like so many guards barring the way to a temple.
John Bradley is no less idealistic, but his material takes us on a journey of the real horrors of the nuclear age and pointless violence. His poems vary in shape and pace, at times unwinding in a catalog of radioactive detail, as “Watch Alice Glow” does. It is interesting that we can find out so much about nuclear history in a book of poems where individual lives are interwoven with the big issues. Bradley travels through the shadows of the twentieth century, where Vice President Quayle meets General Pinochet and the Jews are deported from Anne Frank’s Amsterdam in 1941. This is dour territory, with bizarre moments such as the voice of a believer in “Rapture of Fire: Amarillo, Texas, 1984” who pleads: Why don’t you do it tonight,/ Jesus? Do it tonight!/ Oh, that would be fantastic./ If you’re ready to go,/ it would be fantastic.With all the approaches John Bradley takes, from the historical and technical to the lyrical of “Animal Light, for Federico Garcia Lorca,” he is able to surprise us as we turn the pages. Perhaps he is at his most effective in the straightforward and compassionate “Bosnian Love Poem,” which opens: He was a Serb, she a Muslim./ A Muslim and a Serb in love// in the city of Sarajevo. And ends: Bosko, face down. Admira left/ arm across Bosko’s back.// He, a Serb, she, a Muslim, embracing./ Everything we need to know.
Of course there is more, and we know we shall relive this story in other languages at other times, but the poem is universally relevant just as Raouf Mama’s stories speak to the world from a single culture.
David Chorlton
UP NORTH
by Harry Smith and Eric Greinke
Presa :S: Press (2006) 40 pages, $6
PoetryUp North is the work of two poets, the book divided by Maine Poems by Harry Smith and the Northern Michigan Poems by Eric Greinke. Together they give a poetic picture of those northern climes.
Smith, a small press mainstay, works the land of Maine in his poems. And most of that work focuses on the tools of the land: the axes, a potato hoe, knives, saws, a hay-rake, and even a blueberry winnower. His lines are littered with the physical embodiments of labor: I use the shorter head long-blade Maine ax, in “Axes,” or a rude object/ picturesque with its homemade five-foot haft,/ axed from found hardwood & shaved smooth by knife in “Potato Hoe.” He sums this trope up best in “Blueberry Winnower”: The machine becomes the measure of me. It’s not just tools that populate and evoke the physical world in Smith’s poetry. He draws on the natural and the manmade, the carpenter ants and the voles, the skeleton of a Ford truck and the ironware white pitcher for a doll. And this eye for detail is on display in most of these poems but is lacking in the similarly themed, weak bookends of his section “Getting Lost” and “Paths.”
Greinke, a contributing editor to Presa, is concerned with the hardworking North, too. In “Green Wood,” he writes of building his cabin from green wood: When it cured,/ It was so hard & dark/ That no nail could penetrate. And his poems have their share of tools, “Swiss Army,” for example, about the knife. But he also considers the changes from a rural society to an urbane one, the casinos, the tractor in the field abandoned: The tires are flat & cracked, fenders red with rust, elderly flywheel locked tight. Greinke shows more form variation than Smith but often to Greinke’s detriment. Smith’s longer lines give him room to create his Northern world while Greinke’s elliptical style sometimes leaves too much to the reader’s imagination, even in his prose poems.
Smith and Greinke make an insightful pairing in Up North. Their poems are drenched in the sweat of hard work and the cold wind of place. They tell us what the North is, what it has been, and what it has lost.
S. Craig Renfroe, Jr.
BEHIND EVERY DOOR
by Terry Godbey
Slipstream Publications (2006) 39 pages, $7
PoetryIn Behind Every Door, Terry Godbey gives us a chapbook collection of poetry that inspires comfort with the familiarity of everyday events and a blend of foreboding and eager anticipation of changes to come with love, aging, and death. She reveals ordinary moments of life in such a way as to make them seem a magical dimension only shared by the speaker, a few select characters, and the reader. In “Valentine’s Day in Elementary School” and “Fourteen,” she shows us first flirtations through the most innocent of eyes looking for love in the holiday ritual and a game of hide and seek. In “What Holds Me Up,” we see a girl’s dreams of bike riding blend in and out with reality: That night in a dream I circle the block,/ wobbly then steadier, my ride so real/ I awaken with hair wild from wind. We share in the girl’s newfound desire to soar.
With most of the poems being narrative, Godbey proves a master at the style by making it work for her in poems such as “Bully,” where the bold move of naming the culprit is countered by the fear underlying the affront appearing in print. The poem “Eight Years Old” uses a bucolic blend of simile and metaphor to show the sweet nature of a child with hints of dreading his too-quickly-approaching teenage years. Also exhibiting a mastery of form, “Dim Doorways” takes the title image and transforms it from spoiled children to baby birds to horses carrying us into the final line.
Despite these threads of domestic discovery trailing a sense of the bittersweet, some of Godbey’s poems read too dark. In pieces such as “And the Neighbors Never Heard a Thing” and “Two Mothers Stranded in the World,” we suspect from the title onward that all is not well. But in others such as “Hot Flashes,” we do not predict the humorous exchange between mother and son, the memory of a drug trip causing the beautiful waves of rainbows/ and hummingbird wings/ rolling around me, or the also humorous I think of moving to Alaska/ to roll in the snow like a dog,/ my tongue hanging out turn to the black-hearted villain of the final lines. She makes the dive too late to resurface with any new revelation.
But there are several excellent examples of the darkness turning ultimately uplifting. In “Wilderness,” a woman’s estimation of her beauty paling in comparison to wildflowers ends with her being remembered to her lover by touch. A son’s offering of bath toys and joy overcomes his mother’s irritation at his invasion in “Hydrotherapy.” Throughout this collection, Godbey gives a fresh voice to the ups and downs of life by filling those moments of delight and despair with magic and mystery. With her words, we see the extraordinary just behind the ordinary.
Heather Jane Collings
THE APPARITIONERS
by George Witte
Three Rail Press (2005) 88 pages, $18.50
ISBN 0-9760470-1-2, PoetryIn this wide-ranging collection, George Witte fills his poems with a variety of natural features (drought, sinkholes, ridges, snow) and many that are man-made (pollution, ruined buildings, Halloween).
Clearly comfortable with nature, he often teaches us small lessons in geology, ecology and other natural sciences. For example, In “Talus Slope,” we learn of a ridge that is Buckled up by continental/Grind so slow and powerful it/Fused frail-boned fossils of an age/Long dead into an iron spine. . .In “The Country of Perfect Weekends, he ridicules our tendency to regard fair weather as good and rain as bad. No one seemed to care—/Terrific day! was the watchword—/and while whole forests burned to ash/We watered our lawns, secretly/At night against the Governor’s/Decree…”
In “October Rose,” the poet presents an ode to a flower that has been coaxed into blooming by a warm spell in mid-autumn, and this inspires one of the more lavishly sensuous passages in the book: A bee//with you awakened by a clement breeze/mines the folded mysteries/of your core, lingering/over outer petals, until/the promise of your taste—/the buried fire of succulence—/returns its kiss.
Witte shows a clear preference for language that is deceptively plain and direct, yet he manages to construct images that are rich and memorable. He describes “The Covered Well” as fossilized in moss and a place that, like a sinkhole’s yawn/. . .is gulping paradise whole. In “Voiceover,” the voice the poet hears is snow, soundlessly explaining/why and how it visits earth. . .”
This author never seems to go for the guffaw, but shows flashes of humor. One of my favorite lines in the book appears in a poem entitled “Halloween”: We choose a skull to light our patio.
In the wryly amusing opening poem, “An Open Letter,” we are told, There’s something to be said/for sitting still and letting things come clear. Then we are shown a picture of fog burning off a lake. Later a friend writes, My doors are open wide, windows propped/so wind feels free/to flip through my mail…/scattering pale/handwritten pages on the lawn for everyone/to read. A passing motorist pulls over and furtively stuffs a single sheet in his back pocket before driving away.
In a more serious vein, the title poem opens with a scene in which a father (the poet, we presume) is reading to his young daughter whose schoolmate died—a boy, the cause unclear. The teacher, meaning to give comfort to the children, tells them, angels hovered down to steal him while he slept./Now parents across town keep vigilant… waiting for the children to wake to find themselves abandoned/to their common nightmare, the thrum of wings.
These poems are skillfully written and worthwhile. Never flashy or strident, Witte writes from a firm moral base, without being condescending, and has much to say about the way people relate to the earth and each other.Richard Allen Taylor
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